despite his quasi-aristocratic airs, Roosevelt was not a brilliant or heroic man. Like Biden, he was a skilled political operator.
That is precisely what people are expecting from Biden, too. He must save US democracy from the ravages of a political crisis. To do so, he must reestablish trust in the system. He has promised to make his country less polarized, and to restore civility and truth to political discourse. In this endeavor, his lack of charisma may turn out to be his greatest strength. For all that he lacks in grandeur, he makes up for by exuding an air of decency.
Is Buruma’s bewering juist dat Biden -- net als destijds president Franklin Roosevelt -- ‘een geschoolde politieke vakman’ is? Ik zal allereerst Thierry Meyssan hierover kort aan het woord laten. Eind januari 2021 kwalificeerde deze prominente Franse onderzoeksjournalist met betrekking tot Biden’s inauguratie-toespraak dat ‘it was an announcement of the return of imperialism and its justification by US exceptionalism.’ President Biden verklaarde: ‘We are a great nation. We are good,’ en dat de 'Amerikanen' vanzelfsprekend ‘can make’ de VS ‘once again the greatest force for good in the world.’ Kortom, de bekende fanfare dat de exceptionalistische natie met haar elite en haar militair-industrieel complex tot taak heeft de wereld te leiden. Vervolgens vat Meyssan de rol van Biden kort maar krachtig samen:
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (78) entered politics more than half a century ago. He has served seven terms as a senator (1973 to 2009) and two terms as vice president (2009-2017).
As an elected official from Delaware, he participated in the United States’ operations against tax havens that they do not control. The aim was to force the holders of capital to transfer it to what has become the world’s largest tax haven: Delaware.
During all his mandates, he has mainly defended the interests of the Pentagon.
During the wars in Yugoslavia, he campaigned for the arming of Bosnian Muslims and supported the action of Osama bin Laden’s Arab Legion as well as that of Saudi and Iranian troops. With his friend Republican Senator John McCain, he pushed President Bill Clinton to intervene in Kosovo.
During the war in Afghanistan, he was the first politician to go there to support Afghan-American President Hamid Karzai.
He promoted the idea of a war against Iraq and the assassination of President Saddam Hussein. He later gave his name to a plan to break Iraq into three separate confessional countries in line with the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy.
When he became Vice-President, he participated in the intoxication of the UN Human Rights Commission on the situation in Libya and thus justified the destruction of this country. He also took part in the propaganda against Syria and supported the jihadists.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article212053.html
Where did we Americans acquire the right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations — be they autocracies, monarchies or republics — that do not threaten or attack us?
When we have intervened in these nations militarily, disaster has most often been the result. It was partly because the regimes of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen did not comport to our ideas of good governance that we went in militarily to change them. Result: millions of dead, wounded and displaced Arabs and Muslims all across the Middle East. A historic calamity.
When the Arab Spring arose, we embraced it. The democratic revolution was here! And what happened in the largest Arab nation that responded as we insisted, Egypt?
An ally of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, was ousted. The Muslim Brotherhood was voted into power. It was replaced a year later by a new general, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, a man more ruthless than Mubarak.
https://www.creators.com/read/pat-buchanan/02/21/ideological-imperialism-is-leading-to-a-bad-end
Met andere woorden: Ian Buruma’s bewering dat president Biden ‘een houding van fatsoen uitstraalt’ is gebaseerd op diens ‘rechvaardiging’ van het ‘Amerikaans exceptionalisme,’ dat keer op keer eindigt in de ‘vernietiging’ van landen en in ‘miljoenen dode, gewonde en ontheemde Arabieren en Moslims in het hele Midden Oosten.’ Niet voor niets kwalificeert Buchanan deze biljoenen kostende politiek als een ‘historische ramp.’ De Amerikaanse politieke activiste, Medea Benjamin, een ‘self-described "nice Jewish girl”,’ beschreef begin februari 2021 de exceptionalistische mentaliteit van zowel de liberale- als de neoconservatieve Amerikaanse elite als volgt:
Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America’s international power and authority. Back in the imperial heartland, the political marketing industry that Rove and his colleagues were part of has had more success dividing and ruling the hearts and minds of Americans than of Iraqis, Russians or Chinese.
The irony of the Bush administration’s imperial pretensions was that America has been an empire from its very founding, and that a White House staffer’s political use of the term ‘empire’ in 2004 was not emblematic of a new and rising empire as he claimed, but of a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an agonizing death spiral.
Americans were not always so ignorant of the imperial nature of their country’s ambitions. George Washington described New York as ‘the seat of an empire,’ and his military campaign against British forces there as the ‘pathway to empire.’ New Yorkers eagerly embraced their state’s identity as the Empire State, which is still enshrined in the Empire State Building and on New York State license plates.
The expansion of America’s territorial sovereignty over Native American lands, the Louisiana Purchase and the annexation of northern Mexico in the Mexican-American War built an empire that far outstripped the one that George Washington built. But that imperial expansion was more controversial than most Americans realize. Fourteen out of fifty-two U.S. senators voted against the 1848 treaty to annex most of Mexico, without which Americans might still be visiting California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah and most of Colorado as exotic Mexican travel spots.
In the full flowering of the American empire after the Second World War, its leaders understood the skill and subtlety required to exercise imperial power in a post-colonial world. No country fighting for independence from the U.K. or France was going to welcome imperial invaders from America. So America’s leaders developed a system of neocolonialism through which they exercised overarching imperial sovereignty over much of the world, while scrupulously avoiding terms like ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’ that would undermine their post-colonial credentials.
It was left to critics like President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to seriously examine the imperial control that wealthy countries still exercised over nominally independent post-colonial countries like his. In his book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism, Nkrumah condemned neocolonialism as ‘the worst form of imperialism.’ ‘For those who practice it,’ he wrote, ‘it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.’
So post-World War Two Americans grew up in carefully crafted ignorance of the very fact of American empire, and the myths woven to disguise it provide fertile soil for today’s political divisions and disintegration. Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and Biden’s promise to ‘restore American leadership’ are both appeals to nostalgia for the fruits of American empire.
Past blame games over who lost China or Vietnam or Cuba have come home to roost in an argument over who lost America and who can somehow restore its mythical former greatness or leadership. Even as America leads the world in allowing a pandemic to ravage its people and economy, neither party’s leaders are ready for a more realistic debate over how to redefine and rebuild America as a post-imperial nation in today’s multipolar world.
Every successful empire has expanded, ruled and exploited its far-flung territories through a combination of economic and military power. Even in the American empire’s neocolonial phase, the role of the U.S. military and the CIA was to kick open doors through which American businessmen could ‘follow the flag’ to set up shop and develop new markets (president Woodrow Wilson in 1907. svh).
But now U.S. militarism and America’s economic interests have diverged. Apart from a few military contractors, American businesses have not followed the flag into the ruins of Iraq or America’s other current war-zones in any lasting way. Eighteen years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq’s largest trading partner is China, while Afghanistan’s is Pakistan, Somalia’s is the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Libya’s is the European Union (EU).
Instead of opening doors for American big business or supporting America’s diplomatic position in the world, the U.S. war machine has become a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power to destabilize countries and wreck their economies, closing doors to economic opportunity instead of opening them, diverting resources from real needs at home, and damagingAmerica’s international standing instead of enhancing it.
When President Eisenhower warned against the 'unwarranted influence' of America’s military-industrial complex, he was predicting precisely this kind of dangerous dichotomy between the real economic and social needs of the American people and a war machine that costs more than the next ten militaries in the world put together but cannot win a war or vanquish a virus, let alone reconquer a lost empire.
China and the EU have become the major trading partners of most countries in the world. The United States is still a regional economic power, but even in South America, most countries now trade more with China. America’s militarism has accelerated these trends by squandering our resources on weapons and wars, while China and the EU have invested in peaceful economic development and 21st century infrastructure.
For example, China has built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in just 10 years (2008-2018), and Europe has been building and expanding its high-speed network since the 1990s, but high-speed rail is still just on the drawing board in America.
China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, while America’s poverty rate has barely budged in 50 years and child poverty has increased. America still has the weakest social safety net of any developed country and no universal healthcare system, and the inequalities of wealth and power caused by extreme neoliberalism have left half of Americans with little or no savings to live on in retirement or to weather any disruption in their lives.
Our leaders’ insistence on siphoning off 66% of U.S. federal discretionary spending to preserve and expand a war machine that has long outlived any useful role in America’s declining economic empire is a debilitating waste of resources that jeopardizes our future.
Decades ago Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that ‘a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’
As our government debates whether we can ‘afford' COVID relief, a Green New Deal and universal healthcare, we would be wise to recognize that our only hope of transforming this decadent, declining empire into a dynamic and prosperous post-imperial nation is to rapidly and profoundly shift our national priorities from irrelevant, destructive militarism to the programs of social uplift that Dr. King called for.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection. Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/05/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-american-empire/
Maar dit soort intelligente analyses via de werkelijkheid zult u niet snel vernemen van de ‘corporate media’ die de belangen van de corrupte elite behartigen. Alleen de dwaasheden van figuren als Ian Buruma bereiken de ‘goed geschoolde’ burgers in de polder, en ver daarbuiten. Naar de hel met de broodschrijvers van het failliete ancien regime.
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